[techtalk] Mutt functionality

[David Merrill]

On Thu, Jul 05, 2001 at 09:33:02PM +0100, Telsa Gwynne wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 05, 2001 at 10:57:43AM -0700 or thereabouts, Michelle Dukich wrote:
> > 1.  We tried to use Mahogany and slurped all our old
> > emails over to it.  It is COMPLETELY useless to search
> > for old messages by keyword which is a BIG need for
> > us.  From what I have read in Sven's Man pages, it is
> > indeed searchable.  Is this true?
> 
> Searchable by the standard commandline tools 
> (grep thing Mail/receive*) or by a keybinding which is 
> usually escape-V (or do I mean escape-B? I forget :)) 
> to search for a pattern in the bodies of all messages 
> in the folder you're in. 

Yes, and for really powerful searching look for a tool called
grepmail, which does even more. Blows all other mail search facilities
comletely out o' the water.

> > 2.  Can and how do we get all our emails from Mahogany
> > over to Mutt...with as little fuss and muss as
> > possible?
> 
> I have been looking at the Mahogany web page but it doesn't
> seem to say anything about mail formats. "slurped all our
> old emails" to it makes it sound like it uses a different
> format from whatever you last used, but I can't find out
> what mahogany uses. 

iirc, from when I looked at it long, long ago, it uses mbox and
maildir. If Mahogany does in fact use the unix standards mbox or
maildir, then mutt can handle them. Or there will be a tool for
converting them. This is when you feel thankful that your files are
all plain text and not .pst files like Outlook.

> > 3.  Can we cut and paste text within and between
> > emails with Mutt?

You use your regular text editor, so you can do anything you would do
within it. Cutting & pasting between two emails is not made really
easy by mutt, but it can be done. I `s'ave the first message, so it's
in a small text file all by itself, then `r'ead (in vi) that text file
into my other message. When replying, quoting is done automatically of
course. This only applies to compiling several quotes from several
messages.

> Well, you can run two mutts open on different messages
> and cut and paste like that. 

Or that, um, yes. I have occasionally had a minor problem when running
two mutts simultaneously because messages are not marked as read
consistently (or was it the other way 'round?).

> Only thing I can think of is that mahogany is GUI, I believe? 
> Mutt is firmly, adamantly, text-based. It will do things like
> display pics if you tell it to, but it assumes you may be
> reading on a console so it won't do that by default. (It
> tells you the attachment is present, and you can either
> open them on a "as you meet them" basis, or you can set it
> up always to open certain sorts.

And it displays pics by launching xview, and html by launching lynx.
Configurable, of course. If you're used to a more `fancy' client like
Outlook, you might struggle to adjust. I did. But it's worth taking
the time to get through that. It's a powerful little program that
requires you to learn a bit. Once learned, though, you will just love
it. You can do things no other client can.

If you read 5-10 messages a day and are only on one or two lists, you
can get by with another client. If, like me, you get 100-200 messages
a day on 10+ lists, then you need mutt. :-)

And you need procmail, too!

hth,

-- 
Dr. David C. Merrill                     http://www.lupercalia.net
Linux Documentation Project                   david at lupercalia.net
Collection Editor & Coordinator            http://www.linuxdoc.org

My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii.  She sells C shells down 
by the seashore.